How Improving Financial Management Directly Impacts Drug Pricing

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Jennifer Kyle, CEO and founder of Condor, discusses the inspiration behind creating a financial cloud platform for biopharma R&D. During the beginning of her career in auditing and finance, she repeatedly encountered the same financial management challenges across various biotech companies. This led her to develop Condor, a platform that integrates clinical and financial systems, providing a unified system of record for accruals, vendor oversight, budgeting, and forecasting. Future plans include advanced AI and machine learning for benchmarking and deeper integrations with clinical systems.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How does improving financial management directly impact drug pricing?

Jennifer Kyle: Financial management's direct impact on drug pricing is kind of simple. Clinical trial outcomes ultimately affect drug pricing. Prices are set to recover the significant R&D investments before that patent cliff expires. This includes expenses from clinical trials, regulatory compliance, and the high rates of failure. It's not just one clinical trial; it's all of the trials that you've ran—and most have failed in the pursuit of getting it to market. You've got to look at those entire portfolio costs. The higher and less predictable these development costs are, the greater the pressure to set higher prices to achieve that profitability and to ensure funding for future treatments.

Managing your cost is extremely important to be able to recover that revenue. Aside from drug pricing, the predictability of your costs and financing is directly tied to the availability of new treatments. We see this specifically around oncology and rare disease therapeutics. Those programs are very expensive and highly unpredictable. Especially with rare diseases, there aren’t massive patient populations to offset those costs.

Being able to fail faster for a lesser amount of money, and being able to pivot and adjust, is ultimately paramount for being able to get that drug to market as fast as possible and into the hands of patients that need it.